Good Morning Michael,
Well it's official, I started my very own plan today. I've put my food in and have even written in my fitday journal. I'll keep you posted as to how this goes. I CAN do this.
Ramona

An active person eating 2000 to 2200 calories a day? That person should be losing weight like crazy - and not have any noticeable fat or a doctor telling him or her to lose weight!

A harmless (relatively speaking, because it is short-term) experiment to expose the culprit is this: go to the supermarket and buy several TV dinners (complete prepared meals in the freezer section). Stock up on bottled water while you are at it. Give yourself the goal of eating only those foods - ONLY those foods - and drinking bottled water for three days.

Put the frozen meals' nutrition data, from the box information, into fitday custom foods database for yourself. Then eat those meals when you are hungry but only when you feel it's time to eat a meal (not have a snack). Eat each prepared meal, all of it, and log it into your fitday food log. Drink water whenever you are thirsty. (Bottled water is nice because you can take it anywhere, but tap water is fine, too.)

At the end of three days, look at your food logs and see how many calories you have eaten and then look at the scale. How much do you weigh? Did you lose or gain?

What this accomplishes is 1) it keeps you honest about exactly how much food you are putting in your mouth, even taking into account that the nutrition data on the box is not 100% accurate (it is accurate enough, really!) 2) it shows you what your intake of calories is doing to your weight, without taking into account all the impact of your physical activity.

If your caloric intake is strictly controlled, all the calories being burned are the gravy, the icing on the cake, so to speak. You can fine-tune your dieting efforts but only when you can control with some level of precision the intake and output. Caloric intake - eating food - is really your best shot when it comes to control. It is also the area most people tend to fudge on (excuse the reference to fudge), unwittingly. When you see how your body reacts to food, you pay closer attention to measuring food or having someone else measure it for you (as is the case with prepared meals).